We are now down to one boat and no storage room. Only four dock lines and two jobs tie us to Seattle. We've been living aboard Nordhavn 5263 since taking delivery on Friday February 19th, and three days ago, the new owners took delivery of our Bayliner 4087.

The past week has been a busy one. We took delivery of the 52 late Friday afternoon and brought it from Elliott Bay Marina to nearby Bell Harbor Marina. There we had a second, temporary, slip with room to raft the old boat, the 4087, against it. Our first docking there likely was among the most difficult we'll face for a while. The slip was barely big enough for the 52, with a power cruiser in front and a police boat perpendicular behind. We had to slide the 52 in sideways, then back down behind the police boat, while avoiding crushing the cruiser in front. Then we moved the 4087 over from our standard slip and rafted it beside the 52. That was enough for Friday night.

 

Early Saturday morning, we picked up a rental truck and emptied our storage room. We nearly filled the 10-foot cube van. Our 5'x5' storage room was packed from floor to ceiling with items from our house, and some parts and furnishings from the 4087 that we don't use. We transferred everything from the truck down to the dock beside the boats, and moved what belonged with the 4087 onto that boat. And since we had a truck, we also picked up two Ekornes recliners that had arrived recently on order from back in October. By early evening we still had a massive pile of boxes on the dock. The weather fortunately was predicted to be clear through the weekend, so we left it all on the dock for the next day.

 

On Sunday, we transferred everything off the 4087 and the dock onto the 52. The 52 has a more sloping brow than the 47, making for a large storage area. We filled that completely, plus almost every room inside.

 

We then moved the 4087 to another temporary slip, transferred the 52 to our regular slip, and moved the 4087 back to the original temporary slip, this time tied to the dock instead of the 52. We'd removed so much weight from the 4087 that the waterline had shifted up several inches.

We spent early part of last week getting the 4087 ready for transfer, and then worked on settling into the 52. On Friday, the new owners officially took possession, and left the marina on Saturday. For the first time since we’ve purchased it back in 1999, someone besides ourselves was at the helm as the boat headed out into Elliott Bay. We sold the boat to James' uncle, so we'll definitely be seeing more of it in the future.

Also last week, Pacific Asian Enterprises project manager Jeremy Henderson called to tell us the fuel capacity is 1,860 gallons, a full 190 gallons more than we had originally requested. 11% more range! We love good news like that. Thank you Jeremy.

Commissioning on the 52 is not yet complete, but we wanted to take delivery in order to finalize the 4087 sale. So the Emerald Harbor crew has been finishing the work at Bell Harbor while we dig ourselves out from the mound of boxes. As the boat emerges from the unpacking, it's looking wonderful. Even as a work in progress, we're loving being aboard. From a comfort perspective it compares well with our past houses, if a bit smaller, but this one can go anywhere in the world.

 

 

L to R: Jeremy Henderson, James and Jennifer Hamilton, Jeff Merrill

Jeff Merrill just posted 5263 Seattle Arrival – Dirona makes a splash! In this article, Jeff covers the build and delivery of Nordhavn 5263. The article ranges from the early discussion phase, through the build in Xiamen, China, to the delivery and first cruise under power, with pictures of all. 

Thanks to Jeremy Henderson, the 47/52 project manager for delivering a great boat, and Jeff for all his help and insight throughout the project.

 

Last Saturday we ran the dinghy down to Tacoma to watched the offload of Nordhavn 5263. Similar to visiting the yard, but on a smaller scale, watching the offload was an adventure, and an exciting part of the purchase and build process. We did have a minor difficulty in the offload, and Don Kohlmann of PAE Northwest handled it with an extraordinary effort.

We’ve posted more details and pictures of the delivery at http://www.mvdirona.com/topics/nordhavn/n5263delivery.aspx

Nordhavn 5263 arrived in Tacoma at 5:22AM this morning assisted by Weddell Foss and Henry Foss. We took our dinghy down and the fog was so thick we couldn't see the bow at times. We'll do a more detailed blog entry with more pictures but here's a quick sampling of some of the pictures.

The first view as the Ever Ethic emerged from the fog:

5263 tucked safely away up on deck:



Getting lowered into the water:



Floating in the sun:



Underway heading North towards Seattle:



When we left this morning at 5:45 it was 28F. Its warmer now at 43F but its been a long cold but exciting day. We'll post more pictures and details soon.

--jrh
jrh@mvdirona.com

Nordhavn 5263 finally is en route from Asia, on board the Ever Ethic. The ship is scheduled to arrive into Tacoma on December 4^th. We’ll still have weeks of commissioning before the boat actually is ours, but this definitely is a major milestone. A safe splash at Tacoma and an uneventful trip to the Emerald Harbor Marine docks will be another.

Our boat originally was scheduled to ship to Seattle from Xaimen between October 22-27^th on the Dijksgracht, and that ship had been delayed until Nov 8^th. Then the shipping company dropped the Seattle stop to more quickly deliver an emergency shipment of generator parts to a customer on the east coast. Fortunately, Nordhavn was able to get our boat on another ship only a week later. Rather than a direct shipment from Xiamen, however, our boat was first transported to Taiwan, then loaded onto the Ever Ethic bound for Los Angeles, Oakland and finally Tacoma. We're lucky that the delay was not a lot worse.

We've been watching the Ever Ethic's progress using VesselTracker.com, one of several sites that display ship locations using AIS data. You can view by vessel, port or general region. For example, this page shows all the reporting AIS vessels in and around Seattle.

The Ever Ethic no longer is within range now--it's somewhere in the Pacific. But we'll be looking for it near Los Angeles in a couple of weeks.

We just took delivery of the dinghy for our Nordhavn 52, an AB 12 VST with a 40HP Honda outboard. We’d ordered it a while back, and weren’t planning to take delivery at least until commissioning on the Nordhavn had started later this year. But we thought it would an efficient way to run back and forth between our winter moorage at Bell Harbor Marina, and Elliott Bay Marina, where Emerald Harbor Marine will be commissioning the boat. The two marinas aren’t that far apart (map of area), and, having sold the car, we’d been biking back and forth this past year without much trouble. But the bike trip does take time, and can be a uncomfortable in the rain. And Seattle does get the occasional winter storm. :)

The new dinghy is a real step up from our old 9-foot West Marine RIB with its 8 HP motor. The high seat back on the center console is very comfortable, and the deep-V hull and raised tubes make for a smooth, dry ride, even in near 30-knot winds. We can run between the marinas in less than 10 minutes, and there’s plenty of room for dive gear, or our bicycles on board. For now it will live behind our current boat at Bell Harbor until we mount it on the boat deck of the Nordhavn. It will be a tight fit—we’ve had removable rails installed along the starboard side of the boat deck to make that more workable.

We hadn’t needed a separate registration for our current dingy—we’d instead just numbered it with our main boat’s registration number appended with a “1”. Our current boat isn’t documented (partly because we weren’t US Citizens at the time we purchased it). But the new boat would be documented, and we weren’t sure what the impact would be, since documented vessels don’t display state registration numbers.

According to the USCG, “documentation of your vessel does not cover the vessel's tender or dinghy. These craft fall within the jurisdiction of the motorboat numbering laws of the state of principal use. Please contact your state agency that handles the registration or numbering of motorboats for further information.”

The new one, it turned out, would need to be registered separately. To be exempt from registration in Washington State, under RCW 88.02.030, the vessel must be:

1. equipped with a motor less than 10 HP;
2. owned by the owner of a vessel for which a valid vessel number has been issued;
3. display the number of that numbered vessel followed by the suffix "1" in the manner prescribed by the department; and
4. be used as a tender for direct transportation between that vessel and the shore and for no other purpose;

Even if the motor was less than 10HP, that direct transportation clause was a concern. In researching the registration requirements, we’d read about the Coast Guard questioning folks who were simply touring around in the dinghy and not using it for direct transport between the vessel and shore. And while out in the dingy near Point Defiance this summer, the Tacoma Police stopped us to verify the dinghy’s registration and confirm that we had all the required safety systems on board, including lifejackets and a whistle. It’s apparently a $280 fine not to not have the vessel properly registered, and they seemed eager to enforce it.

Because the new dinghy is less than 16 feet long, we didn’t have to pay the Watercraft Excise Tax, and the total bill was less than $40. The adhesive numbers we’d bought for the current dinghy hadn’t lasted well, so we are instead going to try this number plate system to display the registration.

Choices like engine brand are personal. We didn't make a Deere vs Lugger decision on our Nordhavn 52—we would have been happy with either. Although the high quality support offered by Lugger clearly is important, the reason why 5263 will have a John Deere main is that we wanted a little bit more power and Lugger didn’t produce one that would fit.

The Nordhavn 52 is a longer, heavier version of the Nordhavn 47, and we had heard from many Nordhavn 47 owners "wonderful boat, but I wish it was just a little faster." This is not a universal sentiment. Many hold the opposite view and argue that the boats would be better with less power. Nonetheless, many owners I respect wanted more speed, and this influenced our decision.

The arguments against higher horsepower include greater fuel consumption, increased engine weight and the risk of engine underload. What folks sometimes don't understand is that a 265 HP engine operating at 150 HP will consume very nearly the same fuel as a similarly designed engine rated at 165 HP also operating at 150 HP. Fuel consumption is driven by the horsepower produced, rather than the engine’s rated horsepower. And in this case, engine weight is not a factor. The Lugger 1066T.2 that is standard with the Nordhavn 47 and 52  is a marinized John Deere 6068—the same engine series that we are installing.

Some folks agree that a higher horsepower engine occasionally would be nice for increased speed, but argue that the additional horsepower rarely would be used. As a consequent, the main would spend much of its life very lightly loaded. There is no question that engines need to be run at the designed operating temperature to reach full life. My experience with 4,000 hours on my current Cummins engines is that engines can be operated at very low HP outputs while still maintaining proper operating temperature. This, however, is a hotly debated topic. Personally, given the choice of 1) not having the power to achieve a speed-length ratio of at least 1.34 or 2) being able to achieve 1.34 but with the engines often operated at a lighter load, I prefer the second camp. And, I've seen more engines damaged by overload than under. But I don't discount the concern entirely. Boating is full of compromises and tough decisions.

In thinking through whether the 52 needed more horsepower, we calculated horsepower per thousand pounds across the Nordhavn fleet:

•        N40: 3.30     (50,000 lb @ 165 HP)

•        N43: 2.75     (60,000 lb @ 165 HP)

•        N43: 1.75     (60,000 lb @ 105 HP original engine)

•        N46: 1.75     (60,000 lb FD @ 105 HP)

•        N47: 1.94     (85,000 lb FD @ 165 HP)

•        N50: 3.75     (80,000 lb FD @ 300 HP)

•        N55: 2.66     (124,500 lb FD @ 330 HP)

•        N57: 2.66     (122,000 lb FD @ 325 HP)

•        N62: 2.19     (155,000 lb FD @ 340 HP)

 

Note: Weights are based on published specs at the time we did the calculations. Some are full load (FD), others are ambiguous. It’s rare, however, that any boat weighs exactly what a manufacturer claims.

 

With the extended cockpit and flybridge, not to mention all the equipment we planned to install, the 52 would be a heavier boat that the 47. If we assume it would weigh 100,000 lbs fully loaded, the standard 165 HP would be make it the lowest powered boat in the fleet with a ratio of only 1.65 HP/1000 lbs. I've been on the original 43 with only 105 HP, and did not want to have less power to weight.

Lugger doesn't make a more powerful engine that will fit, so in this case, the decision was not really based on brand as much as output requirements. We went with a keel-cooled John Deere 265HP 6068AFM75. This provides 2.65 HP/1000 lbs, which is just about identical to the Nordhavn 55 and 57, although still less than the 50. As an added bonus, the 6068AFM75 is 14% more efficient at rated output, is more efficient across the operating range, and is closer to a continuous duty engine than the Lugger 1066T.2.

Xiamen is a popular destination with Chinese nationals, but less so with foreigners. Although we were there for three days, we didn't get a chance to see much of the city. We spent most of our time at the South Coast Marine boat yard as the final details were being completed of what would become our new boat. We had a great time, learned a lot, and really enjoyed ourselves.

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We’ll be taking a brief hiatus from blogging during the first three weeks of August. Tomorrow we leave for China. You might wonder why we would go to China during the hottest time of the year. For example, our first stop, Xiamen, is expected to hit 95F today, which is fairly typical weather for this time of year (actually its comparable to the unusual weather we’ve been having in Seattle over the last week). The timing of the trip is driven by a boat we’re buying, nearing completion in the Xiamen China boat yard: Boat Progress. The goal is to see the boat roughly 90% complete so we can catch any issues early and get them fixed before the boat leaves the yard. And, part of the adventure of building a boat, is to get a chance to visit the yard and see how they are built.

 

We love boating and, having software jobs, we work a lot. Consequently, the time we do get off, we spend boating between Olympia, Washington and Alaska. Since we seldom have the time for non-boat related travel, we figured we should take advantage of visiting China and see more than just the boat yard. 

 

After the stop at the boat yard in Xiamen, we’ll visit Hong Kong, Guilin, Yangshou, Chengdu, and do a cruise of the Yangtze River and then travel to Xian followed by Beijing before returning home.  

 

                                                                --jrh

 

The roof is now on the pilot house of new Dirona, and other exterior work is progressing. But the most obvious progress is inside, where many of the changes that we've specified are taking shape. We'll be visiting the yard in Xiamen in early August to see it in person. One of our early challenges was to install a day head. The standard day head design was to replace the stacked washer dryer, shown behind the louvered door just starboard of the steps to the pilot house in the top right picture below. Instead of stacked washer/dryer, a combo unit would be installed in the pilot house. We had initially considered this design, but preferred a separate washer/dryer and didn't want to give up space in the pilot house either, so were going to install the washer/dryer on the starboard side of the guest stateroom. This would chew up a lot of storage space however, and getting the units in and out for service would be tricky. Later we came up with a design where the day head tucks into a nook aft of the washer/dryer, with a sliding door that closes off the whole area. We mocked up the space to using tape and a stool and felt there would be just enough room. It looks like it will work nicely. In the salon area, we added a wall forward of the starboard settee to enclose the day head into a small room. One problem with this design is that location is the standard place for a TV lift. So we instead installed the TV on the port side, as we'd deleted the port settee. With more width available, we were able to install a 46" TV.    We've made a bunch of changes to the galley, some shown in the pictures below. The original design for the aft galley counter has a cabinet starboard of the sink, then the dishwasher, then a stack of small drawers and then the trash compacter. We shifted the dishwasher to be next to the garbage compacter and joined the drawers and the cabinet next to the sink into a single wide unit with a deep, wide drawer on the bottom, a shallow wide draw above, and a single small drawer next to the sink basin (top right picture below). Our last two houses have had deep, wide drawers like this in lieu of cabinets, and it allows much greater flexibility on storage and better use of the space. The bottom right picture is of the stove area. We replaced a stack of small drawers to the right of the stove with a single drawer and a cabinet below with a divider for storing long flat items such as cookie trays and cutting boards.

The pilot house and the settee are taking shape as well. We've not made many change there.

  

Normally the guest stateroom has open shelves above the desk. We've instead specified cabinets with locker doors to give us more enclosed storage space. We widened the desk slightly to make up for some of the space lost to the cabinets. And we widened the guest stateroom bed to give more room at the foot of the bed.

  

The engine is in place under a tarp, with the fuel tanks on either side, but not much else has been installed in either the engine room or the lazarette. The lazaratte has a ton of space, but we'll soon have it and the engine room stuffed with equipment. Jeremy Henderson, our project manager at Nordhavn, jokes that we're trying to sink the boat.

  

We often get asked, why do you boat or what do you do out there?  Our answers revolve around experiencing nature and exploring new areas. We enjoy talking about what we have found in our book, Cruising the Secret Coast, and in the blog we maintain.

Recently John Marshall, who owns Nordhavn 55 Serendipity, posted one of best answers we’ve seen to “why we cruise?”  With John’s permission, it follows.

The remarkable thing about cruising on a boat like this is that we can go to truly isolated places and enjoy nature in its rawest and most primal (and beautiful) form, and still have every comfort of home.

Sometimes when I step outside the warm, bright confines of the boat at night and stand out there just listening to the wild, with the boat completely silent, the contrast gives me goose bumps. Inside is 5-star elegance. Outside is wild, cold, primal, uncompromising wilderness. It's a very bizarre but wonderful kind of transition that occurs in seconds, allowing me as much of either as suits my mood at the moment.

I've turned off the TV after watching a movie with the HD plasma screen and sound system delivering a performance that's as good as any theater, and then stepped outside the boat to find myself standing in the absolutely silent wilderness, without another human being around for tens of miles. A largely untouched wildness of wolves and bears and nature at its finest.

The closest equivalent would be a cabin in the deep woods or high on a mountain side in a wild area. Except you can't build cabins in places like national parks or many other wilderness areas, and you can't push a button and move them to someplace else.

Anyway, it’s a mix of perceptions and images and sensations that carry me away every day we're out. I've journeyed many places in the world, lived in far-away lands for many years, traveled in RV's, backpacked through the Rockies, climbed many peaks in my younger years, and the closest analogy to this feeling is when I was an avid backpacker and could carry my "house on my back". A snug tent and warm sleeping bag.

Inside my tent, reading a book with a flashlight, I was largely protected from the elements that might be raging outside. Yet one step outside my tent, and the wilderness I had to walk through to get back to civilization was uncompromising. There was no 9-11 to call if I got in trouble.

This boat in Alaska or northern BC is kind of a 5-star equivalent of that. What is common to my backpacking, however, is that despite all the comforts and the gadgets, you can't let yourself forget that you are on a little boat in a big sea and a deep wilderness far from anyone who could help you, and that piece of chain that leads to the bottom is never completely secure.

That's where the comparison to a 5-star hotel or cabin in the woods breaks down. On a boat, we are always voyaging, even when we're anchored in a snug cove. We might turn off the DVD and shut down the cappuccino maker and go to the comfort of our warm bed, crawling under the down blankets, but toss in 40 knots of unexpected wind, fog and driving rain in the middle of the night, and combine that with a dragging anchor, and that DVD and the plasma TV and the surround sound are suddenly completely meaningless toys.

Now its engines and rudders and windlasses and working on deck in the violent conditions and you are suddenly a seaman fighting the cruel sea for your very survival, just as sailors have had to do for millennium.

You have awoken from being cradled in 21st century luxury to find yourself in the midst of an adventure, and only your own skills and those of your mate or crew will take you to safety.

I truly believe that its adventures and unexpected challenges like this that keep us alive and young at heart.

The house and hull for new Dirona came out of the mold a few weeks back and have now been joined together. In the top left picture below, our three engines await installation. From right to left: main engine, John Deer 6068AFM75; wing engine, Lugger 40HP Lugger L844D; and generator, 12 kW Northern Lights.

  

  

The boat has a lot of height to gain—the flybridge, stack, and boat deck are still in the mold. The stack will be installed with a tabernacle hinge so that it can be lowered or removed completely, using a Travel Lift. We’re hoping to be able to reduce the air draft enough to clear the lowest fixed bridge along the Great Loop: the 19’1” AT&S Railroad Bridge on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

Our next boat came out of the mold a few weeks back at the South Coast Marine shipyard in Xiamen, China. The yard is efficient in moving the big molds and hulls around. The time between the first picture and the last in the first set below is less than an hour.

   

  

  

The interior has begun to take shape as bulkheads are installed. The bottom photos show the port-side fuel tank. The forward section of the fuel tank, with a gap below, is an extension that gives the Nordhavn 52 an extra 100 gallons per side over the 47.

   

 

 

Last Friday I visited the engine for our new boat (next boat). It’s a John Deere 6068AFM75 M2. The standard engine in the Nordhavn 47 and 52 series is a Lugger L1066T.2 with a ZF220A gearbox. Both are great, long lasting components. We chose to move to the John Deere 6068 to get a bit more horsepower, a closer to continuous rating, and increased fuel efficiency. 

 

On the horsepower front, we moved from the 165 HP of the Lugger 1066 up to 266 HP of the John Deere 6068. The Lugger is a Medium duty rating where the maximum cruise is 200 RPM off of the rated RPM.  It’s not designed to be run at the full 165 HP continuously.  The 6068 is rated at 266 HP and is a M2 rating meaning it can run at 266HP for up to 16 hours in 24 and it can run at 231 HP continuously, without break for the life of the engine. 266HP is arguably more than the boat needs but I like lots of head room and an under stressed engine.

 

Looking at efficiency, the Lugger produces 165 HP while consuming 9.6 Gal/hour (see http://www.northern-lights.com/PDFs/brochure_pdfs/L1066_series.pdf) which means that it produces 17.188 HP/Gal/hour at rated output. The John Deere produces 266 HP while burning 13.5 Gal/hour (see http://www.deere.com/en_US/rg/ESC/QuickSpecs/MarineProp/6068AFM75_A_S0_R0.html) which means that it produces 19.703 HP/Gal/hour at rated output. The increase in efficiency of 2.515 HP/gal/hour sounds like a small increment but it actually represents a full 14% improvement. 

 

A 14% reduction in fuel consumption, if realized over the life of the boat represents substantial savings. But, what we find even more interesting is the potential lengthening of the cruising range. +14% is like adding 205 gallons of fuel to the standard 1470 gallons. Engine efficiency varies with RPM and output but manufactures typically only publish numbers for rated output and show curves for the rest.  Matching curves is less precise but it appears matching curves that the advantage of the 6068 is maintained at all cruising output levels.  Given that the 6068 has an aftercooler, we expect higher efficiency. The potential downside is one more component to service.

 

Essentially both the Deere and the Lugger are the same engine. They both use exactly the same base John Deere industrial engine and both are great engines differing only in optimization points and the 6068 is somewhat more expensive. As with all things marine, decisions like these are a balancing act, there is no one right answer, but we like the set of trade-offs offered by the 6068 and so went with it for this boat.

 

The new engine produces sufficiently more power that the ZF220A gear box is no longer acceptable. We moved up to the ZF305-2 for this application. It’s a beast.  More than required but it ended up being the best fit with sufficient capacity and I love having more capacity than needed in the mechanical systems.

 

Our 6068 was at Cascade Engine Center near Seattle last week to have the high output alternators installed and to prepare the engine to Nordhavn’s specifications for installation into the 52. I took some pictures of it in final test prior to being air freighted to China next Tuesday. Ironically it’ll be returning to Seattle on the deck of a freighter when the boat is delivered later this year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overall, I like the drive belt as layout installed by Cascade, the engine looks good, runs quietly, and produces close to no smoke even when cold starting. I hope it does as well in service as it looks during its initial test runs.

 

                                                --jrh

James Hamilton, jrh@mvdirona.com

  

For many years, we’ve been planning to buy a world-capable trawler as our next boat. Dirona is ideal for extended cruising in the Pacific Northwest while we are working, and we expected to purchase the next boat when we retired and had time for longer-range cruising, perhaps in a decade or so. The plan was that this next boat would be our final boat, built solidly enough that it would outlive us.

We’ve been interested in a Nordhavn as that boat since way back in 2001, when we first requested in information packet from PAE. We eventually realized that if this boat were going to outlive us, it made more sense to get it sooner and enjoy it for an extra ten years, rather than wait until we retired. So last year we purchased Nordhavn 5263.

The Nordhavn 52 is an enhanced 47. Standard upgrades include a 5-foot cockpit extension, a 2-foot boat deck extension, a restyled flybridge and 200 gallons additional fuel capacity. The boat molded a few weeks ago, and we expect to take delivery this winter. We’ll post more details as the project progresses.

  

Early this morning the commercial ship Amazon River arrived in Seattle from China. Part of the Amazon River's cargo was a cross-section of the current Nordhavn line: a 43, a 52, and a 68. The 52 was the first Nordhavn 52 in what I fully expect will be a very successful new line of Nordhavns. It was fun to see it on its inaugural US sailing.

  

The Nordhavn 68 in no-load form displaces 156 thousand pounds so its considerably heavier than the standard container that these cranes normally host off deck or from below. What follows is the launching of the 68 but all three followed the same procedure. The crane lowered four chains that are attached to the cradle that mounts the boat to the deck. The entire boat and cradle assembly is then carefully raised, shifted out beyond the ship to the water, and then lowered to the water.  As the boat lands in the water, a small craft drops off a couple of crew members. As they arrive on the boat, they first check to ensure the boat is watertight and safe, then inspect the mechanical systems before starting the boat.  With the engine running and the boat safe to sail, the crane lowers it another few feet allowing the boat to float off the cradle.  Then the boat is  backed free of the cradle and sailed to the commissioning port.  In this case, Elliott Bay Marina in Seattle.

All three vessels will be commissioned by Emerald Harbor Marine under the supervision of PAE project managers. We have a slip in Elliott Bay so we’ll be seeing lots of these three boats as we go back and forth.